Disney has finally gone and done what many thought was impossible. Seven decades after Snow White, they're making an animated feature with a black princess in the lead role. The Frog Princess will introduce the world to Maddy, a girl from the French Quarter of New Orleans who we assume must be the royalty of the story.

Growing up as a young girl in Jamaica with a black and white television, it took my parents getting a rusty old VHS to reveal the secrets of Disney animation. The world of Sleeping Beauty and Bambi were comforting: the good guys won and the baddies were usually cast out of the kingdom. That was great for an hour and a half, but it had absolutely no relevance to the rest of my life.

Little girls who looked like me lived outside the enchanted forests. We never even made sidekick status. Hell, we didn't even inhabit the same kingdoms. Black Disney characters were conspicuous by their absence. Even the Little Mermaid's Sebastian (a Caribbean crab, no less) did nothing to redress the balance. I knew all the words to Under the Sea and Kiss the Girl but even that could not make up for the Disney's reluctance to add any characters more ethnically more diverse than Pocahantas or Mulan. Even then, the suspicious whiff of the "exotic" was never far off.

Disney was a corporation who could make nearly half billion dollars in revenue from their tweenies show That's So Raven with old Cosby kid Raven-Symonè, but shied away from showing diversity in their choice of animation characters.

We still have to wait until 2009 to see just what kind of a black princess Maddy will be. Will our New Orleans royalty be more of the Princess Beyoncé ilk, complete with flowing blonde highlights, or will we have to make way for a truly revolutionary (and far more representative) Princess India Arie?

Whatever she looks like, we can't underestimate what this seemingly innocuous move on Disney's part will mean for young women, who like me had to grow up surrounded by white imagery of goodness and beauty their whole lives. There will be little girls of all races who playing with their Princess Maddy dolls not thinking anything of it. I just hope Disney's first animated black princess avoids the fate of early black screen characters and survives the end credits. Or come to that, avoids adoption by Madonna.